Tag Archives: shanir ezra blumenkranz

I always appreciate it when musicians schedule great concerts when I’m coincidentally planning on being in a city for unrelated reasons – in this case, Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz’s residency at the Stone corresponded with my five-day Thanksgiving holiday, which I was spending a few miles outside New York at my parents’ house. I was able to sneak into the city for a set on Friday and a set on Saturday to see Abraxas performing material from their Book of Angels album and premiering some new music from John Zorn called “Metempsychomagia.” (Let’s see if I can manage to spell that correctly throughout this blog post!)

Abraxas is a quartet consisting of Aram Bajakian and Eyal Maoz on electric guitars, Kenny Grohowski on drums and Shanir Blumenkranz on electric bass/gimbri (he played the gimbri for Masada and the bass for Metempsychomagia). Blumenkranz is the band leader and I believe does the arrangements as well. All four of them are simply excellent musicians, I’ve heard each of them in various ensembles over the years and always enjoyed their work. You might have seen one or two of them on tour recently – Kenny Grohowski was performing with Secret Chiefs 3 this fall and Aram has been touring with both Lou Reed and Diana Krall for the last couple of years.

The first night at the Stone was the Masada night, and while I’ve seen them perform this material about four times now, I think this might have been the strongest set I’ve seen them play. (I feel like I always say that when I see them – hopefully because they are getting better and better and not because I go to so many concerts that I can’t remember anything I heard more than six weeks ago…) Maybe I liked it so much in part because the Stone is such a great place to see music, you feel like you are a part of the performance rather than just watching. Or maybe you only feel like that when you’re sitting eighteen inches from one of the guitar players, like I was. Anyway, it was a really fun show, loud and aggressive and very well done in general. If you haven’t heard them, they have a heavy rock sound but with an exotic flavor thanks in large part to Blumenkranz’s gimbri and his flavorful arrangements.

Due to a game of Uno with my four-year-old nephew taking much longer than planned, I was very pressed for time and didn’t have a chance to pack up my music-blogger kit; I showed up to the concert with no camera or other recording devices. Luckily, my friend John brought his camera and took some footage from the seat next to mine:

On Saturday night, for the premiere of Metempsychomagia, I made sure to bring all the (more…)